If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I used America as an example because you used it as an example! The very same could be used for any Western country at the time

Well the problem with America is that it's retained it's horrid acceptance of corporate bribery due to its large acceptance of uncontrolled industry. But that's another story.

Originally Posted by Celery

Why do we need to vote for people to wade through the stubborn and uncompromisable bureaucracy when they created it in the first place? It's like walking up a down escalator

Because otherwise we wouldn't be able to retain the judicial system, the capital production/control system, and the various smaller bureaucratic systems necessary for day to day life like marriage licensing, demographics and censusing, etc. These systems all work very well, but they depend on the exact, proper wording and bureacratic process that politicians give them.
We could take votes to elect committees to control each area, but at that point it's basically a representative democracy again.

Originally Posted by Celery

The same could be said about the present, how are we going to satisfy people's wants and needs by giving them very limited and corruptible options?

Because the people elect a representative who most closely matches their political stand-point to represent them in a system of parliament (At least, in Canada. With America's bipartisan system you're totally fucked, but as stated before I'm not arguing for that system either). Nobody will ever find a politician with viewpoints that exactly match there own, but it's the best we can do. You keep on insisting that a direct democracy will lead to immediate change, but how will there ever be change when instead of 200 old white men sitting in a room talking shit there's suddenly 300 million people all trying to get a point across. It's like a crippled form of anarchy.

Originally Posted by Celery

The establishment of direct democracy doesn't imply the complete destruction of the previous system. A senate of elected representatives could still be established to introduce laws and bills, which the public could later vote on

We do have that, it's called a referendum, and it's existed in every major democracy for the last 200 years. If you're arguing for mandatory referendums for every law I can tell you why social progress in laws would never occur.

Originally Posted by Celery

Of course it seems like people will be disinterested in bills and laws from a present perspective, the current system encourages parties, which spoon feeds and distorts them to for the public. I believe (THEORETICALLY maybe) that people will be more encouraged to partake in voting and political discussion once the blinders are taken off.

Bills are extremely long and filled with legal jargon, I highly doubt every person will have a) the time and b) the legal expertise to be able to decipher every bill they vote on.

Originally Posted by Celery

However, I am still a die hard Communist, don't worry. But, if I were some kind of sadist and wanted to delay the inevitable collapse of capitalism by a decade or so through appeasing people, I'd use this system

These are the inevitable problems we forgot about when we democratised the world. Really intelligent writers like Baudelaire and Conrad used to have absolutely no faith in the average person to make any decisions. As a species there appears to be no direct progression towards a positive idea, the subtleties of politics are just blurred by more and more complexities. Every time a new technology is invented, we never think of its implications on the world. "Darkness at Noon" by Arthur Koestler is pretty interesting on this subject, it depends on the "relative intelligence of the masses"

still you cant really restrict democracy in a way rigorously enough to try to make sure only smarter, more competent, more informed etc people are able to vote, at least with the view of making it a long-standing thing. that shit will always get out of hand. thousands of years of totalitarian monarchism and god-like lording over masses of peasants all resulted from the fact that SOMEONE had to be in charge of managing of the extra 20 bushels of wheat the first successful attempts at agriculture produced etc.

"I'll go," said Chagataev. "But what will I do there? Build socialism?"
"What else?" said the secretary.